Quibble, 85. Temple

Reaching the Divided City's heart, Quibble and Alnasl face a reckoning with the past.

85. Temple @Alnasl

Like vapor or mist, dusk rose in the room with the setting of the sun behind the ruins to the west. Opening the doors, we huddled together and shared a meal of hard bread and beef jerky – nearly the last left, for we had given much to Luht to sustain him on his longer trek. Quibble ate sparingly and with downcast eyes. Seeing the question in Lurah’s gaze, I silently shook my head.

When night took the city, we ventured downstairs and outside – in passing, I paid my respects to the Dead Man with a blink of my eyes – but at once we hurried back inside. The gossamer-glass was still hot, so hot we felt the heat through our boot soles and broke out in sweat. The moon approaching its last quarter had risen by the time we judged the glass safe to walk, though it was still warm. Guessing midnight to have come and gone, with great urgency I led my companions east. Soon we arrived at the banks of a wide river surfaced in glass. Here and there, the glass was worn away and a rising tide of water lapped over the edges of the holes. A tang of salt hung in the air, suggesting this river was really an inlet of the sea. On its opposite shore stood a colonnaded stone temple in the style, Quibble said, the Ancient called Greco-Roman.

“That’s where we have to go,” she told us.

Again I noticed Lurah gazing at me. This time, I nodded. Quibble was being unusually secretive about the reasons for her decisions, but in steering us towards the night-door I had to trust her. We could search forever for it in the part of the city now behind us, and I suspected we wouldn’t discover anything more revelatory than the Dead Man. And perhaps the Ancient had thought it clever to hide such advanced technology as a night-door in the oldest and least technologically advanced place. Still, I pointed out, crossing the river here was a dangerous undertaking.

“We’ll cross there,” Quibble said, raising a finger to indicate a bridge to the north which bifurcated an island in the river’s midst.

This way indeed showed promise: the bridge was thronged with the glass statues of the Ancient themselves, all bound for the locale of the temple. An exodus of some sort had been underway. Yet it would turn out the temple was not the Ancient’s only destination. Beyond the bridge, the crowd spread out, moving down the length of a narrow park. The better part of a mile east of the temple, a colossal stone spike rose over a small hill to an abrupt, jagged halt in mid-air. The pinnacle of the obelisk lay at its foot. Farther off, moonlight gleamed on other structures, one of them another temple with a dome at the other end of the park. Just beyond it, a wall of gray stone almost as high as the dome cut through this part of the city on a north-south line and then veered northwest, forming an obtuse angle. And some distance beyond the wall, towers such as those west of the river reappeared, though these were much sparser and not, like the others, outlined in artificial light.

Given the grandiosity of the architecture around us, Lurah remarked, it was rather absurd that the Djer named this city of the Ahnk-far after the wall dividing it, which even from this distance looked crude.

“It’s not named for the wall,” Quibble hypothesized. “There was a civil war.”

“A civil war?” Lurah scoffed. “Do not all these people seem united in purpose?”

“No, they seem united in obliviousness to one another,” said Quibble. “It makes me wonder what the war was fought over and who won.”

In the nearby temple, we found a clue supporting Quibble’s hypothesis. Facing the park through a bare portal, a headless marble giant sat on a throne atop a pedestal, dwarfing us. The giant’s bearded head lay beside the pedestal, an ear pressed to the floor as if listening for vibrations in the stone, with his eyes gouged out. The vandals had also defaced the wall behind the statue: an inscription there must have told the man’s story or his legacy, but it had been chiseled away. He’d been rendered sightless and voiceless, as if his eyes and words were accusations the vandals couldn’t face.

“Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!” Quibble said, no doubt quoting a scrivener. I frowned at her moonlit reflection in the glass swathing the pedestal, and gazing back at me, she announced, “This is where I’ll mirror with the amber. Go find the sah, vision. I think she’s sick.”

Lurah had left without my noticing. I found her beyond the columns outside the portal, on her hands and knees, retching. I sat beside her, rubbing her back and shoulders, and when she was done – fortunately, she didn’t vomit all she’d eaten – I helped her up and handed her my flask, urged her to drink all the water in it. “Are you not ill, too?” she asked.

“Not yet. I’m truly sorry, Lurah. We shouldn’t have brought you into the city with us.”

“Ri,” she said, addressing me in Far, “you know the Qeht better than I do, so you will perhaps think it silly of me, but I believe she is hiding something from us.”

“It is not silly. She lied to us about looking at the light. I did not think I would ever hear Quibble tell me a lie. But what does it mean? If the past is prescient, she thinks she is protecting us, though I cannot guess why or what we need protection from. She is not deceitful at heart, but she errs in believing she knows better than others. It is a bad sign – that I know. She lied to Definition, too. It was disastrous for them both.”

“Then shall we confront her?” Lurah proposed.

“For now, no,” I decided, though in fact I felt uncertain. “Let us keep our eyes open and see what comes to light of its own accord. The lie does not sit well with her. But she needs us to believe in her, for she has too little belief in herself. Come, sah. She must surely be done looking in the mirror by now.”

When I saw what Quibble was doing, though, I had fresh cause to second-guess my decision. At first, appoaching her through the tangle of gossamer-glass statues and seeing both amber and blue light, I imagined she was only acclimating the amber glass, now hers, to the yinman’s potency, teaching it to tolerate such a strong kindness, just as I’d suggested she do. But then, reaching her side, I saw she’d begun to sweat and shake. She was murmuring.

“...eyes blink into nothingness. For to see the face is to know the person. For to know is to love. A world of made is not a world of born. We’re together…”

Our eyes locked in the mirror, but hers seared with a silver sheen and it was as if they were looking right through me, transfixed by some other, faraway vision. Then I remembered, terror seized me, and grasping her by an arm, I spun her towards me. But there proved to be no need to strike her as I’d once done. The silver sheen vanished, her eyes resumed their natural hues of green and blue, and with a familiar smile she said, “It’s all right, vision, I’m here. This time, I know we got away with it.”

I stared at her, for the moment speechless with anger.

“What were you doing, Qeht?” inquired Lurah.

“Something she shouldn’t have been,” I said. “This is the bitter end, excelsior! I didn’t follow you through all this peril – Lurah didn’t come here – just to see you rectify yourself!”

“I didn’t rectify myself!” Quibble shot back, incensed in turn. “I had control of the dream, utter control of it! Do you understand, vision? Mastery! I mastered death – my own death! I—”

Quibble stopped short, her mouth hanging open and her eyes wide, as if she only now realized the import of her words. I waited, in no small measure of shock myself, but seeing Quibble flummoxed and at a loss to explain her temporary madness, I heeded the advice Vega once gave me – “Unanswered questions are good to have, so let her have them” – and I answered her perplexity with nothing more than a slow blink of my eyes, an assent. I see you, I know you, and I trust you, I promised Quibble. She flushed and began to cry.

“Alnasl,” she wailed, “why didn’t you stop them?”

“Stop them? Who? Stop them from what?”

“Vega! Aladfar! Quiddity’s rectification – what else?!”

So this is still the trouble, I thought, reflecting morosely that, had I the possession of my amber, it would have known and told me much sooner.

“I tried to stop them,” I said. “So did Utopia.”

“And what? They wouldn’t listen? Then why didn’t you kidnap Quiddity, since you’re so good at that?”

“They listened.” I paused to steel myself for the coming moment. “But it was no use. They’d known what they were going to do since before you were born. All of them – the lady, the silence, and the One.”

Quibble gasped, wiped her eyes. “The One?” she breathed. “Mother?”

“Yes,” I admitted, hating myself for doing it. “She agreed to her rectification – no, ‘agreed’ isn’t the word. She insisted on it. Quibble, your mother wasn’t a lamb led to the slaughter. She was a martyr, a willing martyr. I might have talked my lady and my lord out of it, if only I could’ve talked Quiddity out of it. She believed in you too much.”

“In me? Then why didn’t she just tell me so?”

“Because made is not born. Because whatever you’d become—” I pressed a hand to Quibble’s chest. “—it had to start here.”

I withdrew my hand, turned away with a nod at Lurah, and walked out of the temple. I didn’t look back, though I wanted to.

Now Quibble knew the full truth of her abandonment, the paradoxical truth of her mother’s faith. While I might have tried to console her, I knew this truth was a private loneliness, inaccessible to anyone but her. Consolation was pointless, immaterial to the truth. Either she would live with it or die of it, and nothing Lurah or I could do would change what the spitfire chose.

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